How to Manage Landscape, Collection, and State of the Art Search

Landscape, collection, and state of the art search may sound and look similar, but understanding their nuances can make a world of difference to the quality of your search results. Discover the key differences and why defining the scope, expectations, goals, and audience are four vital steps to success.    

Compared to more 'traditional' forms of prior art patents search, the need for landscape, collection, and state of the art search (or SOTA) can be commonly overlooked or misunderstood. 

As we covered in a previous webinar, these types of searches are broader than patentability, freedom-to-operate (FTO), and invalidity searches, as they encompass a wider range of patent and non-patent literature related to a cross-section of a technology or IP portfolio/holding. This makes them especially useful for research and development (R&D), marketing, bibliographical review, ideation, analytics, and benchmarking reports and purposes.  

Key Differences Between Landscape, Collection, and State of the Art Search 

Despite the terms often being used synonymously, there are subtle differences between SOTA, collection, and landscape searches. These are best explained in correlation to the granularity of the search: 

• State of the art/SOTA is a ‘micro’ search 

Most suitable for R&D and bibliographical reviews, these types of searches assess smaller sets of patent and non-patent documents to analyze precise and specific solutions to a technical problem. 

• Collection is a ‘meso’ search 

Most suitable for strategic planning, collection searches assess medium volumes of documents for references that could help pinpoint specific technical drivers. 

• Landscape is a ‘macro’ search 

Most suitable for big picture, benchmarking, and marketing analysis, landscape searches assess larger volumes of documents to capture a broader view of innovation in a specific technology area, including what is on the horizon for that space. In contrast to state-of-the-art search, the objective is to search a technical domain, and not specific technical implementations. 

Ultimately, it is fundamental that your chosen patent research or search provider is aligned with your search goals and how you plan to use the results. 

4 Steps to Effective Patent Search 

Step 1: Align and Communicate Your Search Goals Effectively 

When working with a dedicated patent researcher or third-party search party, it’s important to take a collaborative approach, as pre-search communication between you and the search team is critical to achieving the end goal. To help structure such sessions effectively, consider organizing: 

• A brainstorming exercise with your engineers or inventors looking at known solutions to a problem you’re trying to solve; or 
• A business intelligence gathering exercise where you look at what entities are currently active in this space, as well as which entities are filing patents in a specific technical domain.  

To maximize the effectiveness of your landscape, collection, or state of the art search project, we also recommend considering who will be reviewing the resulting report. For instance, will you and your team be reading the patents for content, or will the report be sent to internal stakeholders and decision-makers who are not as familiar with IP? If the patent data is to be used as statistical data to inform a business or marketing plan, a different type of report will be required.   

Step 2: Define Your Search Scope  

Once you’ve defined the search goal and how that goal is going to be achieved, the next step is to scope out the specifics of your search.  

Your time is valuable, so you don’t want to have to sift through an extensive and overly detailed report to find the actual results you need. That’s why determining the exact search scope and, especially, what needs to be included or excluded in the results, is so important. 

Consider what type of solution you want to investigate. Taking the domain of coffee capsules as an example, you could choose to run a search against a: 

• specific design or the materials and packaging used, 
• the ingredients, encompassing a food science investigation, 
• the machines used to employ capsules and their operation, or  
• the personalization of those capsules. 
   

When searching patent literature, the scope of the search could even be adjusted to what is actually claimed. 

Step 3: Estimate and Allocate Time 

As well as optimizing the results, defining the exact search scope in advance enables you to more precisely estimate the search effort (or its feasibility) with your search team or provider.  

Time is a pivotal factor in all forms of patent searching, including landscape, collection, or state of the art search projects. By setting the scope in advance, you can avoid wasted time spent over-searching or reviewing useless results. By communicating on deadlines with your team or provider, you can also find the ideal balance between speed, quality (“noise”), and coverage.  

When briefing your landscape, collection, or state of the art search, we recommend considering the following key points: 

• For a state of the art search to identify representative references of solutions to a technical problem, we recommend 1-2 days. Full coverage is unnecessary for such searches, but low noise is required.
• For a collection search with a FTO consideration, we recommend 2-5 days. Documents must not be missed, and noise should not be allowed. If you go faster (or cheaper) here, you will spend a lot of your time reading useful references—or essential references could be missed.
• For a landscape search for analytics, we recommend a maximum of 2 days. Some noise is permissible as the patent list will not be ready fully; however, noise still needs to be kept low so as not to compromise the statistics.  

Step 4: Identify Search Inputs 

Once you know precisely what you want to include or exclude, the next step is to identify the relevant search inputs. When working with clients, we commonly approach this task by considering the following key questions: 

• Should patent or non-patent literature (NPL) be included?
• Are there any patent or NPL references we should use as a starting point?
• Do you want us to cap the number of references reported?
• Is there a date limit (e.g. only the last 20 years or live art) or range of interest?
• Does the search need to be limited to any specific jurisdiction(s)?
• Which specific competitors or companies should be included or excluded in the search? 
   

Five Key Takeaways for Effective Collection, Landscape, and State of the Art Search 

Whether you manage patent searches in-house or work with specialist patents search providers, such as Questel, the following five points can help to make your search projects more efficient and effective.  

• 1. Landscape, collection, or state of the art search can—and should—be finely adjusted to your specific needs, including search scope, time (effort/budget), coverage, and noise.
• 2. Always define the search type.
• 3. No matter who conducts the search, getting the search scoped correctly is the key to success.
• 4. A quick call can save you a lot time in writing emails.
• 5. The searcher and client should take a collaborative approach throughout the project.  
   

For more information on patent search best practices, including how our patent search and analysis software Orbit Intelligence and dedicated patents search service could support your search goals, contact our subject matter experts today.